Bernanke Makes It Official: He’s Writing a Book

You saw this one coming: former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke confirmed he is writing a memoir about his time at the central bank.

Ben S. Bernanke

Bloomberg News

“I want people to understand what we knew, when we knew it, how we made decisions and how we dealt with the enormous economic uncertainty,” Mr. Bernanke, who ran the Fed during the financial crisis, told the Associated Press on Monday.

Mr. Bernanke told the AP he would be meeting with publishers in the coming weeks. He’ll be represented by Robert Barnett, an attorney who has worked with many high-profile authors including Mr. Bernanke’s predecessor at the Fed, Alan Greenspan

Penguin Press paid Mr. Greenspan an advance of more than $8 million for his 2007 memoir, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World.

Mr. Bernanke, who stepped down Jan. 31 after eight years as Fed chairman, wasn’t available for interviews Tuesday, according to a Brookings spokeswoman.

It’s hardly a surprise. “We’re looking forward to helping Mr. Bernanke with the book he plans to write,” wrote David Wessel, the former Wall Street Journal editor and now director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policyat Brookings, in a Feb. 3 blog post announcing when Mr. Bernanke’s appointment as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

Mr. Bernanke’s book will join other first-person accounts of the government’s response to the financial crisis and recession, including former Treasury chief Henry Paulson’s On the Brink, former Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. chairwoman Sheila Bair’s Bull by the Horns and an upcoming book reportedly to be titled Stress Test by Mr. Paulson’s successor at the Treasury Department, Timothy Geithner, who previously was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

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